I grew up on Long Island. Like many little girls, I was enamored of ballet. My dance teacher’s emphasis on the lines of the dancer’s body fascinated me. By the time I reached the exalted level of toe shoes, it was abundantly clear that dance was not going to be my home. So I transferred my passion to art—I thought I could be like Degas, and paint dancers and horses. I decided to let the drawn lines create movement for me and it was years before I could draw any other way.  
I graduated from Grinnell College, in Grinnell, Iowa, in 1974 with a major in art and a love of landscape. After a year working in New York, I was fortunate to receive a Fulbright grant to study twentieth-century German artist/poets in Munich. Back in New York, I became a graduate student at Hunter College, CUNY, studying most notably with Ralph Humphrey and Rosalind Krauss. After receiving my MA, I became an editor and, a few years later, a test developer at Educational Testing Service, where I worked for just shy of 43 years, primarily with art assessment and relatively unconventional assessments. I live with my husband in Ewing, NJ.